


Memories Out of Time

by sinisterkid92



Series: Of Time [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, I can't think of more tags without spoiling it all so, it's quite angsty, you're going into this blind I suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 09:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9649154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterkid92/pseuds/sinisterkid92
Summary: While he fights to get back to her she fights for normalcy.(continues after Fallen Out of Time)





	

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: there is _one_ continuity error that I should’ve been able to prevent, but… alas. It is what it is and I hope you don’t notice unless you squint really hard. But if you do notice it… I’m aware, and oops! My bad!
> 
> This one is shorter than the first one, and it didn't want to go down on the page as I wanted it to. The words, scenes, and characters had a mind of their own!

The whimpering cry woke her, as it did several times a night the past month. She reached her hand out, clumsily and still half asleep, and turned on the light. 

“Coming Amy…” she mumbled. The cold shot up through her legs as her feet hit the floor, but the cry picked up to a wail, rushing her. Moments later she had the whimpering infant in her arms roooting into chest. “Hungry? Who’d have guessed? You fell asleep on me before” She settled down in the rocking chair, opening her shirt to the hungry child. 

Dark eyes peered up at her, watching her with a focus she never otherwise had. They had started to get more and more pale each day, fading from the brown she thought the girl would have to something closer to her father’s eyes. 

It had taken some getting used to to being someone’s mother. She still hadn’t got the hang of it, not even close. The four week old baby kept her on her toes all the times, slinging new experiences her way no matter if she liked it or not. 

“I wish your daddy could see you.” She caressed the top of Amy’s head, brushing the short dark hair making her quint in approval. “I can see so much of him in you.” She sighed. Ever since she arrived back almost four months earlier she hadn’t heard a peep from him. She’d been kicked off the team, understandably. Being heavily pregnant and then a new mom was only partially the reason. The other reason was fraternizing with a time-terrorist. 

Footsteps in the hallway interrupted her one-way conversation with her daughter. 

“Mom, is that you?” she called out, low and quiet enough as to not startle Amy. She’d done that before, more than once, and had learnt her lesson. 

“Yeah, I thought I heard Amy.” Her mom stayed in the doorway, leaning against it as she watched her daughter and granddaughter.

“Oh, I hope we didn’t wake you…” It was strange living with her mother with her own daughter. She’d always pictured herself more independent, that she would be living with a husband or boyfriend at least when she had a child. Not having a child conceived in the 18th century with a time traveling vigilante-terrorist. 

“No I was up already, I needed to go over this lecture I’m holding tomorrow on kinship and I’m having a writer’s block.” She strained her neck to get a better view of Amy still latched on.

“You want me to look it over?” It had been a long time since Lucy had put her degrees to use, and she was itching to do something with her brain. The monotony of taking care of an infant was getting to her, making her brain sluggish and drained all the time. She loved her daughter, it was just not all sunshine and roses. 

“If you get the time tomorrow I’d appreciate it.” She paused for a second. “Do you need anything, a glass of water? Something to eat?”  
“I’m fine thanks mom.” She looked down at her daughter whose eyes were still focused back on her. “We’re both fine.”

\---

The café was bustling with activity as she sat by the window with Amy knocked out in her arms looking just as milk-drunk as she was. Around the table sat five other women with children the same age as Amy, and for once none of them were screaming. It was the fourth meet-up she’d come to, having grown stir-crazy in the house having no one to talk to, and no way but her mother’s coming and going to measure time with. When her mom had first suggested the meet-ups that she’d heard about from a co-worker Lucy had scoffed. A mommy-date seemed like the type of thing she’d never do. But she was happy that she’d bit the bullet and gone, because it helped.

None of the other moms were single moms, they all had partners that helped out in varying amounts, but they were all first time moms who’d been thrown for a loop in this new dizzying and exhausting experience. They understood the need to vent, but also the need to talk about things that wasn’t their babies.

“Which one of you is Lucy Preston?” One of the baristas had stepped out from behind the bar and stood by their table with a weary expression, as if she wasn’t quite sure what exactly she was doing. 

“That’s me.” Lucy raised her free arm and smiled what she hoped was a reassuring smile at the young girl. 

“I was asked to give you this when you came in?” It was posed like a question, but the girl handed her the manilla envelope anyway. 

“Thank you…” she squinted her eyes to read the girl’s name tag, “Andy.” Through the envelope she could feel the edge of something -- maybe a photo? She placed it next to her on the bench she saw sitting on. 

“You used to be a professor at Berkley, right?” The girl stalled at the table, shifting on her feet and looking over the other moms who were listening with rapt attention to the conversation. A shy smile flashed across her face for a second.

“Yeah, that’s right. Were you one of my students?” Subconsciously Lucy placed a hand on Amy’s stomach, feeling the heavy rise and fall of it.

“I was going to be, before you quit, my friends always talked about how great your lectures were so I’d planned on taking your class during my sophomore year.” Andy shrugged, once again casting a glance over the other moms and clearly not liking the spotlight she was under. “Anyway… hope everything tastes good, I need to get back to work.”

“Thank you again Andy, and sorry about not giving that class anymore…” Andy gave her smile before returning to her job. Lucy turned back to the other women at the table who were watching her with curious eyes. 

“That was weird,” one woman, Gina, said her baby boy watching the café over her shoulder having just settled a few minutes prior. 

“Yeah, what’s in the envelope?” Felicity, a red-headed woman who was practically exploding from excitement as she bounced in her seat asked. “It’s one of those official-looking envelopes you see on TV shows.” 

“It might be about a contract I used to have, boring work things.” She shrugged. Still, it itched in her to open it. Homeland Security and Mason Industries would contact her directly, they had no reason to use a café as a middleman. There was no way to make sure the information remained confidential that way. Any barista being a bit too curious and it would have been all could have been blown. This was something, someone, else. Maybe Flynn, maybe someone else entirely. 

“Strange way to go about it,” Gina raised her eyebrows. Luckily one of the babies started fussing drawing attention away from Lucy’s envelope. 

\---

The envelope contained a list of instructions. 

It was from Garcia. 

The moment she saw his words on the page, knowing he’d written it himself with his pen pressed against the plain white sheet of paper, a sudden longing at hit her. Those memories that had gotten buried under dirty diapers, debriefs, and sleep deprivation reared its ugly head. The softness of his lips. How his puffs of breaths felt against her neck when they spooned in their sleep. They way he breathed her name when she did something silly, as if to say “damn it Lucy”, but then he’d smile unable to keep off of his face. 

It all hit her again, and the longing ran deep into the marrow of her breastbone. Aching and nearly impossible to bear.

She followed the instructions. 

Every night she’d walk the same route. Sometimes with Anna in a buggy, sometimes in a shawl pressed against her chest. She made it into Amy’s nightly routine, as if it was nothing strange about it at all. Both she and Garcia knew that she was under surveillance. It would be foolish of the government not to have her under surveillance. 

Some nights she alternated routes. She didn’t walk through the forested area, or she took a shortcut somewhere else. Most nights she kept it the same. 

It was two weeks until he showed up. That night she’d walked through the forested area like he told her she should do all nights but skip with specific irregular intervals. It had all been written down in a randomized pattern making sure Lucy didn’t accidentally create an identifiable pattern for the surveillance team. 

“Garcia?” She lost the ability to breathe for a second. She clutched Amy against her chest, despite her being securely wrapped around her body. 

“Lucy,” he replied, taking three long strides towards her. His kiss on her lips was bruising and gentle all at once, crashing against her then drawing away to savour the moment. They became two people just breathing each other in, taking a sacred moment to worship what had gone lost between them for months now. 

“I can’t believe you’re here.” She caressed the tendrils of hair at the nape of his neck. Someone had cut it, but it was still long enough for her fingers to play with, twist, comb, and stroke. She kissed him again.

“We don’t have long,” he said against her mouth, his hand parting the shawl and revealing Amy’s sleeping face.

“I named her Amy,” Lucy said then, slowly detangling Amy and pulling her out of the shawl. “She’s Amy Iris Preston.” 

He took her in his arms, holding her against his chest as she was rudely awoken by being taken out of the wrap. “Amy… _Iris_.” He tested her name on his tongue, her middle name said more like a pained gasp. She thought for a moment that she’d done wrong, that he would hate her middle name being Iris, but then he smiled up at her. “Thank you.” He rubbed his daughter’s back, and Lucy had to take on step backward to get a good look at them, the two of them together. Despite knowing better she still took her phone out to take a picture of the two of them, thankful for the streetlight that lit up this part of the forest track. 

“She has your eyes,” Lucy said then. He craned his neck to try to see them, but Amy had closed her eyes again, falling back asleep on her father’s chest. “I have pictures.”

She’d bought a printer and photo paper immediately after getting the envelope, printing out any and all pictures she could find. Of her belly those last few months, of the birth. When Amy was first placed on her chest, when she was screaming bloody murder while being examined by a doctor. Photos of her in the carseat about to go home, in her swing, on a playing mat. Photos of Lucy asleep in a chair with Amy passed out on her chest. And then Amy’s smile growing wider and bigger with each photo. 

“I went a little crazy but… I wanted you to have as many photos as you could.” She pulled the stack out of the satchel she always brought with her. It had emergency supplies for Amy if something were to happen, but it was mostly just for whenever she would meet him. She didn’t know when he’d show up. “It’s the ones I could fit in here. The rest are on this, and there’s videos on there too.” She showed him a thumb drive. “Maybe I should’ve just had it all on the thumb drive?” She didn’t know what was best for time travel. She thought about Agent Christopher’s flashdrive that was still in the lifeboat and that she should tell Rufus and Wyatt about it. 

“No this is fantastic.” With Amy in his arm he could only look at the top photo. It was of Amy lying in her lap looking back at her with a concentrated look that reminded her so much of Garcia. Then he looked down at the baby in his arms. “She has your nose.”

\---

He told her to inform Homeland Security that he had contacted her. She did so immediately after returning home. At his order, to keep them all safe, she had hurried home to make the call, so that no one could accuse her of stalling like she did when Wyatt stole the time machine. 

It didn’t matter what they thought about it because she did what she should have done. 

The instructions he had sent her in the envelope were burned in the fireplace like it never existed in the first place. She kept taking the same walks every night to get Amy to sleep.

\---

When Amy was seven months old she contacted the university. As Amy demolished the banana she’d been given to snack on by crushing it into the table she dialed the once very familiar number to the history department. 

Teaching was the only thing that made sense to her now. She wanted back to her facts, the history she knew. To enjoy life again and not just live it. Amy was her world, but she was never made to be a full-time mom. It took little convincing for the university to accept her back again, and she was going to head a course on American history. 

“Now I just have to sort out daycare for you little miss,” Lucy said as she wiped the mushed banana off of the baby’s sticky fingers. “But we still have another 7 months until then.”

\---

They met each other from time to time. As Amy got older Lucy was able to go out more often. The girl loved the swings at the park and would squeal when the wind got in her hair. Each day revealed something more about Amy’s personality, and it reminded her so much of her own Amy. The stubborn girl doing things her own way, secure in herself and with no fear about taking risks. Baby Amy was all go. She liked speed and things that made her belly tickle with excitement. 

Garcia would throw her up in the hair and catch her over, and over, and over again until Amy was gasping for air because she was laughing so hard. Despite seeing him so few times it was as if Amy knew he was her dad. The way she clung to him like a little baby monkey was different from how she was with other people. Men especially were people she was weary of. It took time before Wyatt and Rufus were allowed to hold her, because in the beginning she would whimper and push her bottom lip out until Lucy picked her up again. Now she tolerated them, and occasionally even cracking up at their antics to get her to smile. 

Lucy knew she loved all her boys. Amy knew she had them wrapped around her finger exactly where she wanted them. 

Sometimes Lucy would ask about the missions. Had he changed history? He had changed some things, nothing big. Nothing that should have impacted her. Were Wyatt and Rufus still chasing him? They were, but it had changed in some way. They worked together sometimes when it called for it. It all checked out with the little Wyatt and Rufus could tell her. Which was pretty much nothing. 

Most of the time they didn’t speak much at all. She would talk about Amy and what she was doing. Mention the preparations on going back to work. She missed the late night talks with him about everything anD nothing. The everyday life where they wouldn’t have to think about what to say every second, and worry about forgetting something. That time she always knew where she had him, what he was up to for the most part of the day. 

But now he left them and she didn’t know if he’d ever come back.

She trusted Wyatt and Rufus to tell her if he died, but she couldn’t be sure they’d come back either. 

\---

That summer she went up to the mountains to the cabin her mother’s family had owned for generations. Some weekends her mom would come up to keep her company, but for the most part Lucy spent most of her time with Amy. They played in the lake, and practiced walking on the unsteady surface in the woods. Amy had started walking about a month before her first birthday, and had already expanded her vocabulary enough to be able to voice her displeasure at most things. 

When Amy napped or went down for the night she’d work on lectures and class work for the coming year. After getting the go-a-head from the dean she’d been working on adapting her courses to incorporate more of what she’d learnt on her trips to the past. She’d researched the events the best she could to be able to back up what she said. What had been lost to time, never recorded or remembered by anyone, were things that would be lost with her too. If she stood up in front of the class to tell an unsubstantiated story about an historical figure she would probably get the boot rather than tenure. 

After two weeks there Garcia snuck inside the house after darkness fell, and he stayed for an entire week. He never went outside with them during the day just in case someone was still out there with surveillance on her, but every night they sat by the fire and talked.

For the first time in nearly a year and a half she could sleep next to him with his body spooning hers like they once did for an entire year. Desire that had been dormant in her sparked to life, and she was relearning sensuality, her sexuality. 

It was over too soon. One morning before the sun he’d roused her from sleep with kisses across her face. 

“I have to leave,” he said, brushing the sleep tousled hair from her face.

“Not yet,” she replied, and kissed him. “I need you one more time.”

\---

Amy thrived at daycare. Though she hated being left there, she detested being picked up from daycare at the end of the day. It both thrilled Lucy that her baby was as happy as she was, and scared her to death. The little baby she’d once cradled in her arms was now squirming and demanded to be put _down_.

But, Lucy had a similar feeling towards her own job. She hated leaving for work, but at the end of a work day she had to tear herself from it. Only the need to see her daughter was enough to motivate her to close down her computer for the day and head home. Once Amy was in bed though she booted the computer up and got lost in the sea of research that was out there.

Finally the world seemed to be back on steady ground. Occasionally her world was rocked with a sense of longing that she couldn’t curb. A longing not to just read about people, but for the people to pop out of the page and interact with her. The knowledge that this was possible, that these people weren’t lost to the past but were reachable had changed how she viewed research. It fell flat for her, and she had to get used to the old way of researching things again. 

Soon enough she had an idea for a new book that she kept to herself. It was rough, maybe wouldn’t ever be actualized, but just like the nagging feeling she had before writing her first book… she knew this one demanded to be written. 

\---

The doorbell rang for the second time that day. The first time it was a girl scout selling cookies, and without hesitation Lucy had ordered two boxes of them. She knew her mom and Amy would help devour them both within a week. 

This time it was a man. There was a strange familiarity about him, and usually she would assume he was one of her students but the senior students were rare and easier to remember the faces of. She was certain he wasn’t one of her students.

“Hi.” His face split open in a wide smile. “Where’s Amy?” He looked over her shoulder into the house. The familiarity with how he spoke Amy’s name, and how he took a step towards her as if to walk into their house set off all alarm bells in her head. 

“Amy’s at work.” His face fell, the smile that had been effortless on his face disappeared. If it weren’t for those alarms going on inside of her she would have asked. Her curiosity almost killed the alarms, but she knew to trust her instincts. Something wasn’t as it should with this man.

“Amy’s at… work,” he repeated the words back at her, as if he wasn’t quite able to get their meaning. “Your sister.” He let out breathy laugh. One of those laughs that Lucy would do just before she would blow up in anger. She took a steady grip of the door, preparing to shut it in his face.

“Yes, my sister.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you have a problem, sir?”

“No, no problem Lucy…” Her named passed over his lips effortlessly, without thought. “Thank you, I’ll be going now.”

\---

They were gone.

Garcia sat in the apartment that was apparently his own. Things were around him that he’d once bought, but it wasn’t this version of him.

Like Wyatt his family didn’t return with the ending of Rittenhouse. Maybe he’d been too late, maybe he shouldn’t have spared Benjamin Cahill. But he couldn’t erase Lucy and his daughter to save his deceased wife and daughter. He couldn’t sacrifice one for the other, so he tried to save them both.

But they were all gone.  
All he had were the pictures. Of Lorena. Of Iris. The two of them together, in separate photos, with himself. Iris as a baby, and Iris as 5 years old. Then there were pictures of Lucy. Of Lucy’s belly swollen with Amy growing inside. A red and angry Amy just born into the world. There were photos of Amy and Garcia, and all of them together.

That had never happened now. Never would. 

Lorena and Iris killed by an intruder. 

Amy erased by her father’s actions. 

\---

Should she know?

Could he put her through that again?

She once knew her sister had been erased from time by him. How would she feel about a daughter she was supposed to have had?

\---

The letter came to her university post. In it were three photos with her. Photos she never knew could have been taken. Because she had never been pregnant, or given birth. The child in the third photo was around a year and grinning at the camera as she clung to her and a man. The baby looked like the two of them. 

She didn’t know much about photoshopping, but she was uncertain how well a person could manipulate a picture like these.

Lastly there was an USB with the word _videos_ on it, and a note.

_I debated whether to tell you or not, but these are memories I should never have erased from another time. I’m sorry, no apologies are enough.._

_Love, Garcia Flynn_


End file.
